You are now watching: Stanton Cruse: Flash for Broadcast Quality Animation

Flash animation expert and founder of High Bar Films in Los Angeles, Stanton Cruse has just completed work on Ape Escape. His current and past projects include ABC’s Slacker Cats, Where My Dogs At, Wow Wow Wubbzy, Sunday Pants: Weighty Decisions (Cartoon Network), Drew Carey’s Green Screen Show, The Phil Hendrie Show (FOX) and EuroTrip (title sequence – Dreamworks).

what are the advantages of using Flash for character animation?

Anything you can design, as an artist, you can animate in Flash – and you can do it pretty quickly. In a couple of days, you can have a fully animated scene that’s in full color, 24 frames per second, that’s broadcast quality and ready to show the world.

what are the challenges of using Flash for character animation?

Early versions of Flash (I started in version 5) had some definite limitations. But as developers were given the ability to create third-party extensions, animators began developing tools to solve specific problems. I’ll give you an example: Say you have a 500-frame scene and want to lay some keyframes down at frame 300; when you click into your character, no matter where you are in your timeline, the playhead jumps back to frame 1. This can be very frustrating if you have a long, complicated scene with a lot of layers and nested parts, and every time you click into a part you have to scroll back through the timeline. Dave Wolfe, an animator at Cartoon Network, has written an extension called Frame Edit that lets you stay at the same frame you were at when you clicked into a symbol. This saves a tremendous amount of time and brainpower.

what are the challenges of producing a broadcast quality show in Flash?

There’s a tendency for things to get rushed into animation without taking a good look at the overall strategy of how to do a Flash show. Elements that aren’t in place initially have to be introduced into the production at some point, causing a lot of back up down the line. There’s a lot of confusion about what a proper set up of a Flash show is, because it’s all so new and we’re still finding our way. But it’s important to figure out how to do it right, and I have some good ideas about that.

how do you see Flash being used, and what do you think, ultimately, its role will be?

Right now it’s mainly being used in television, and it seems to be gaining a pretty strong foothold there. At Six Point Harness, the studio I helped form, we created dozens of pilots. Studios were willing to outsource the pilots to us because we could get them done relatively quickly and cheaply.

As a natural progression of that, larger studios like Film Roman and Nickelodeon – which has its Flash show El Tigre, as Cartoon Network has Fosters – are considering Flash a more valuable tool for doing broadcast production. At Film Roman, there are dozens of shows being produced in Flash. While I think big studios will do more and more shows in Flash, I don’t see them phasing out traditional all together, that’s a well-established pipeline. But this is a transitional time and I feel like the studios are really giving Flash a chance – though nobody has decided yet if the best model is going to be in-house, out-sourced, or a combination of the two. That’s a conversation we’re still having.

how would you compare working in 3D vs. Flash?

Flash can be more challenging than working in 3D. In 3D you have a technical director who controls the models and does very elaborate, well designed set ups. When a character animator hits the rig, it’s like a driving a well-engineered car. Things are logical, they’re where they’re supposed to be and it’s actually pretty easy. When I got to Flash, there were no standards or best practices. The challenge was, how do I use what I know to create models that are well engineered and “easy to drive”?

When I began 3D animation, I approached it the same way I approached traditional. I would spend a lot of time working with the character and creating strong poses until I’d get the scene completely posed out. Then I would do pass after pass of computer interpolation to get some nice overlapping action and flesh out my scene.

When I came to Flash, I did it the same way. On my first day working on Jake’s Booty Call, a 2002 movie produced by National Lampoon, I spent a lot of time creating keyframes and poses of the character. The guys were getting frustrated with me, saying, “Okay, apply some motion tweens already, let’s see this guy go!” But I had to make sure the poses were right first. Ever since then, that’s been my approach. Any time I’ve gone away from it, it takes me a lot longer to get through the scene. I end up getting lost in motion tweens and what the computer is doing, trying to force it to do things it’s not wanting to do. Which means I’m no longer in control of what I’m creating, and the tool is controlling me.

Beyond animation, in running a production, it’s important to control what’s going on there too, and not let it get away from me – which I can achieve by spending the necessary time up front thinking about the end of the production.

you recently completed ape escape. what was that project like?

After Slacker Cats I went to Hawaii to supervise Ape Escape, which was 38 two-minute short films for Nicktoons, produced by Frederator.

The cartoon is based on Sony PlayStation’s popular 1999 video game of the same name. If you’re familiar with the game can look forward to seeing many of the same characters, including Specter, Jimmy, The Professor and others. However, the similarities end there. The episodes were written for an audience of 6 to 13-year-olds who have never played the game. The humor is very slapstick.

I was super excited to do this project, because it was a test of my skills and what I’ve learned thus far. While I’ve run some small shows in the past, I had to scale it up to a larger production like Ape Escape. It was a lot of work – but overall, a great experience.

you’ve made a commercial in 2.5D – what was that process like?

We created the characters using Illustrator as our design platform, and Flash as our animation timeline. We used After Effects to create the environments, and as the camera would move through, perspective would change, giving a sense of dimensionality – but nothing is actually 3D here. The commercial was a promotion for Max Lucado’s book Every Day Deserves a Chance. You can view it on You Tube.

I can imagine doing a project someday with 2D characters animated in Flash, that live inside of 3D vehicles created in Maya, joined together seamlessly in animation. It’s a look I haven’t seen yet. We’ve seen 2D and 3D together, I’ve just not seen 2D Flash and 3D brought together. That’s what I’m ultimately pushing for and hoping I’ll get a chance to do.

when did you know you wanted to do animation?

The first character I ever drew was Cap’n Crunch. I was a Saturday morning junkie, and I used to love Cap’n Crunch commercials – I have no idea why. When I was six years old we moved to the Azores, where there were no cartoons, only The Muppet Show in Spanish. By the time we came back to the states, Disney was doing some incredible work. In particular, I remember the opening sequence of Rescuers Down Under – a little boy runs into the wilderness to play with his friend, a golden majestic bird; the bird tosses him around in the air and pushes him along on the water as he’s water-skiing. There was a lot of unspoken drama – it was very moving, and it amazed me that I could be moved by an animated cartoon.

That experience made me want to create art that moves people and creates an emotional response. With cartoons, comedy has always been and will always be popular, but there was something about those films – the big epic scenes, the scope and scale of what they were doing – that just blew me away. It still does. I love that stuff.

would you like to do something of that scale and scope in Flash? could you use Flash for an entire movie?

I would love to be afforded the opportunity to try. I really feel it can be done. My first experience in Flash was on that movie in 2002, and we’ve come so far since then – although studios had insisted it was preposterous to think Flash could ever be used for broadcast television. Now we’re doing it and they’re asking, “how can we do it better?” Today, people scoff at the idea of doing feature films in Flash, insisting it’ll never happen. Which makes me think it will eventually happen.

in an interview at studiodaily.com, you advised novice users to approach their scene as an artist, not a technician.  “Think in terms of thumbnails, posing, and timing….compose solid drawings and endeavor to create quality animation art.” you stress the fundamentals of art over technology.

The pioneers of our industry spent the best years of their lives innovating and creating our industry. Everything they did is relevant to everything we do. We can’t forget where we came from, and we need to learn traditional approaches-our wheel may be shiny, new and fast, but these guys invented the wheel a long time ago. I’m not sure how impressed they would be with our technology, and I don’t think they’d be impressed at all if we forget what they discovered and learned. We need to retain that knowledge as we push forward into new mediums.

speaking at motion09
Stanton Cruse will be one of the ‘rock stars’ at motion09

10.11 – 10.14 2009 | abq | nm
motion | experience inspiration

………………………………..
author: Lilian Dregalla
Working Story Creative

copyright: © 2008 – 09
motion.tv

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